Thursday, October 7, 2010

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

i carry your heart with me(i carry it inmy heart)i am never without it(anywherei go you go,my dear; and whatever is doneby only me is your doing,my darling)i fearno fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i wantno world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)and it's you are whatever a moon has always meantand whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows(here is the root of the root and the bud of the budand the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which growshigher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

since feeling

since feeling is firstwho pays any attentionto the syntax of thingswill never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a foolwhile Spring is in the worldmy blood approves,and kisses are a better fatethan wisdomlady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry- the best gesture of my brain is less thanyour eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other; thenlaugh, leaning back in my armsfor life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

it may not always be so

it may not always be so; and i saythat if your lips, which i have loved, should touchanother's, and your dear strong fingers clutchhis heart, as mine in time not far away;if on another's face your sweet hair layin such a silence as i know, or suchgreat writhing words as, uttering overmuch,stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;

if this should be, i say if this should be-you of my heart, send me a little word;that i may go unto him, and take his hands,saying, Accept all happiness from me.Then shall i turn my face, and hear one birdsing terribly afar in the lost lands.

Hanne Darboven (born 29 April 1941 in Munich, died 9 March 2009 in Hamburg) was a German conceptual artist. She became best known for her large scale minimalist installations consisting of handwritten tables of numbers.

Hanne Darboven grew up in Rönneburg, a southern suburb of Hamburg, as the second of three daughters of Cäsar Darboven and Kirsten Darboven. Her father was a well-to-do businessman in Hamburg.

From 1962 to 1965 Darboven studied art with Willem Grimm and Almir Mavignier at the Hamburg Hochschule für bildende Künste. From 1966 to 1968 she lived in New York City, at first in total isolation from the New York art scene. In the winter of 1966/67 she met Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre, representatives of Minimal Art. Soon afterwards her first series of drawings on milimeter paper with lists of numbers, which resulted from complicated additions or multiplications with calendar dates, hours and days of the week.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

His dumb ill-fitted glassesSlide down his narrow noseQuickly catching her profileBent in still reposeBut as she turns toward the window He sees her tiny smirkAnd the way that she looks down on The inky fingered clerkThe inky fingered clerk

He follows her as the sun setsAs the day turns into nightHe counts all of her footstepsGetting every detail rightAs he creeps upon the ledge And to his deadly workHe knows no one would suspectThe inky fingered clerkThe inky fingered clerk

As the blood drains from her faceAnd her skin turns into chalkShe hears one last strokeOf her mother’s carriage clockThen finally she is stillAfter one last feeble jerkCradled in the armsOf the inky fingered clerkThe inky fingered clerk

The cops had only her bodyHer hands and feet unboundNot one single clueOr evidence was foundNo trail of blood leadingTo where inky fingers lurkOnly treachery and cunningAnd the inky fingered clerkThe inky fingered clerk

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

…and why do I hate her?She’s got the pinched face of a traitorA liarA fraudShe bleeds brown from the corners of her mouthwhich wraps around her chalky skull filled with cobwebs connected to cunning threads pulling her eyes this way and thatI hate her and I always willAnd I will not hold onto itThis hateAs some have saidI simply willI simply always willHate herBut not simplyI will hate her for all my daysI will give great parties in the name of my hateAnd peopleFriendsWill come to these parties and love me in spite of my hateThey will pity me for my hateMy friendsPity me for my hate…and why do I hate her?

Saturday, July 3, 2010

I really wouldn’tI really couldn’tI really shouldn’tBut here I amWith my glass raised aplombFeeling quite dignified in my reasoningWhy it was God who gave it to us was it not?Of course following that logic, did not he, the inventor of hunger, sickness, death and warAlso have his hand in the making of summers and Groucho Marx?

Friday, June 11, 2010

Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire (French pronunciation: [ɡijom apɔliˈnɛʁ]; Rome, August 26, 1880–November 9, 1918, Paris) was a French poet, playwright, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother.

Hotels

The room is free

Each for himself

A new arrival

Pays by the month

The boss is doubtful

Whether you’ll pay

Like a top

I spin on the way

The traffic noise

My neighbour gross

Who puffs an acrid

English smoke

O La Vallière

Who limps and smiles

In my prayers

The bedside table

And all the company

in this hotel

know the languages

of Babel

Let’s shut our doors

With a double lock

And each adore

his lonely love

Among the foremost poets of the early 20th century, he is credited with coining the word Surrealism and writing one of the earliest works described as surrealist, the play The Breasts of Tiresias (1917, used as the basis for a 1947 opera). Two years after being wounded in World War I, he died in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 at age 38.

Born Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky and raised speaking French, among other languages, he emigrated to France and adopted the name Guillaume Apollinaire. His mother, born Angelica Kostrowicka, was a Polish noblewoman born near Navahrudak (now in Belarus). Apollinaire's father is unknown but may have been Francesco Flugi d'Aspermont, a Swiss Italian aristocrat who disappeared early from Apollinaire's life. Apollinaire was partly educated in Monaco.

Apollinaire was one of the most popular members of the artistic community of Montparnasse in Paris. His friends and collaborators in that period included Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Max Jacob, André Salmon, Marie Laurencin, André Breton, André Derain, Faik Konica, Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, Alexandra Exter, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, Ossip Zadkine, Marc Chagall, and Marcel Duchamp. In 1911, he joined the Puteaux Group, a branch of the cubist movement.

On September 7, 1911, police arrested and jailed him on suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa, but released him a week later. Apollinaire then implicated his friend Pablo Picasso, who was also brought in for questioning in the art theft, but he was also exonerated. He once called for the Louvre to be burnt down.

He fought in World War I and, in 1916, received a serious shrapnel wound to the temple. He wrote Les Mamelles de Tirésias while recovering from this wound. During this period he coined the word surrealism in the program notes for Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie's ballet Parade, first performed on 18 May 1917. He also published an artistic manifesto, L'Esprit nouveau et les poètes. Apollinaire's status as a literary critic is most famous and influential in his recognition of the Marquis de Sade, whose works were for a long time obscure, yet arising in popularity as an influence upon the Dada and Surrealist art movements going on in Montparnasse at the beginning of the twentieth century as, "The freest spirit that ever existed."

The war-weakened Apollinaire died of influenza during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. He was interred in the Le Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris.

The White Snow

The angels the angels in the sky

One’s dressed as an officer

One’s dressed as a chef today

And the others sing

Fine sky-coloured officer

Sweet Spring when Christmas is long gone

Will deck you with a lovely sun

A lovely sun

The chef plucks geese

Ah! Snowfalls hiss

Fall and how I miss

My beloved in my arms

Apollinaire's first collection of poetry was L'enchanteur pourrissant (1909), but Alcools (1913) established his reputation. The poems, influenced in part by the Symbolists, juxtapose the old and the new, combining traditional poetic forms with modern imagery. In 1913, Apollinaire published the essay Les Peintres cubistes on the cubist painters, a movement which he helped to define. He also coined the term orphism to describe a tendency towards absolute abstraction in the paintings of Robert Delaunay and others.

Moonlight

Mellifluent moon on the lips of the maddened

The orchards and towns are greedy tonight

The stars appear like the image of bees

Of this luminous honey that offends the vines

For now all sweet in their fall from the sky

Each ray of moonlight’s a ray of honey

Now hid I conceive the sweetest adventure

I fear stings of fire from this Polar bee

that sets these deceptive rays in my hands

And takes its moon-honey to the rose of the winds

In 1907, Apollinaire wrote the well-known erotic novel, The Eleven Thousand Rods (Les Onze Mille Verges). Officially banned in France until 1970, various printings of it circulated widely for many years. Apollinaire never publicly acknowledged authorship of the novel. Another erotic novel attributed to him was The Exploits of a Young Don Juan (Les exploits d'un jeune Don Juan), in which the 15-year-old hero fathers three children with various members of his entourage, including his aunt.

Shortly after his death, Calligrammes, a collection of his concrete poetry (poetry in which typography and layout adds to the overall effect), and more orthodox, though still modernist poems informed by Apollinaire's experiences in the First World War and in which he often used the technique of automatic writing, was published.

The Gypsy

The gypsy knew in advance

Our two lives star-crossed by night

We said farewell to her and then

from that deep well Hope began

Love heavy a performing bear

Danced upright when we wanted

And the blue bird lost his plumes

And the beggars lost their Ave

We knew quite well that we were damned

But hope of love in the street

Made us think hand in hand

Of what the Gypsy did foresee

In his youth Apollinaire lived for a short while in Belgium, mastering the Walloon dialect sufficiently to write poetry through that medium, some of which has survived.

Oh, love, why do we argue like this?I am tired of all your pious talk.Also, I am tired of all the dead.They refuse to listen,so leave them alone.Take your foot out of the graveyard,they are busy being dead.

Everyone was always to blame:the last empty fifth of booze,the rusty nails and chicken feathersthat stuck in the mud on the back doorstep,the worms that lived under the cat's earand the thin-lipped preacherwho refused to callexcept once on a flea-ridden daywhen he came scuffing in through the yardlooking for a scapegoat.I hid in the kitchen under the ragbag.

I refuse to remember the dead.And the dead are bored with the whole thing.But you - you go ahead,go on, go on back downinto the graveyard,lie down where you think their faces are;talk back to your old bad dreams.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Born December 2, 1958 (1958-12-02) (age 51)Amarillo, TexasOccupation Short story writer, Journalist, College ProfessorNationality United StatesInfluences;Kurt Vonnegut, John Steinbeck, John UpdikeOfficial website

George Saunders (born December 2, 1958) is a New York Times bestselling American writer of short stories, essays, novellas and children's books. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's and GQ, among others. He also contributed a weekly column, American Psyche, to the weekend magazine of The Guardian’s Saturday edition until October, 2008. Currently a professor at Syracuse University, he won the National Magazine Award for fiction in 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2004, and second prize in the O. Henry Awards in 1997. His first story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award. In 2006, Saunders received one of that year's MacArthur Fellowships, more popularly known as the "genius grant". His story collection In Persuasion Nation was a finalist for The Story Prize in 2007. Early life and education

Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas and raised on the south side of Chicago. He is a graduate of Oak Forest High School, located in Oak Forest, Illinois, a south suburb of Chicago. In 1981, he received a B.S. in geophysical engineering from Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. Speaking of his scientific background, Saunders said "...any claim I might make to originality in my fiction is really just the result of this odd background: basically, just me working inefficiently, with flawed tools, in a mode I don't have sufficient background to really understand. Like if you put a welder to designing dresses."[1] In 1988, he obtained an M.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University. Career as author

In his twenties, Saunders considered himself an Objectivist, but is now repulsed by the philosophy, comparing it to neoconservative thinking.[2] From 1989 to 1996 he worked for Radian International, an environmental engineering firm in Rochester, New York as a technical writer and geophysical engineer. He also worked for a time in Sumatra with an oil exploration crew. Since 1997, Saunders has been on the faculty of Syracuse University, teaching creative writing in the school's MFA program. In 2006, Saunders was awarded a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, commonly called a "genius grant". In the same year he was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Saunders currently resides in Syracuse, New York. He is married and has two daughters. He was a Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University and Hope College in 2010, and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series and Hope's Visiting Writers Series. His most recent book, a collection of recent non-fiction entitled The Braindead Megaphone, was published on September 4, 2007.While promoting The Braindead Megaphone, Saunders appeared on The Colbert Report and Late Night with David Letterman.

Saunders' fiction often focuses on the absurdity of consumerism and corporate culture and the role of the mass media. While many reviewers are quick to mention the satirical tone in most of Saunders' writing, many of these same works also deal with philosophical questions of morality. The tragicomic element, concurrently devastating and wildly funny, has earned Saunders comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut, a writer to whom Saunders has acknowledged a debt.[17]

The film rights to CivilWarLand in Bad Decline were purchased by Ben Stiller in the late 1990s and a film has been rumored to be in the works for several years now, to be produced by Stiller's company, Red Hour Productions.[18] Saunders has also written a feature-length screenplay for one of his stories from Pastoralia, 'Sea Oak'. Books Fiction

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Saturday, April 24, 2010

grimy as the walls on The Honeymooner's setyou think no one sees that shit?stupid ass!EVERYONE SEES THAT SHIT!you're dirtyyou think you can hide the shadows?the shadows are far too fastand even if you could...well...why would you want to?every man has shadowssome are lined with shit and shameothers? well why would i care about others?i can scarcely stomach my own

Friday, March 26, 2010

Is he a street photographer? Yes. Is he a documentary photographer? Yes. A photojournalist? A travel photographer? A portraitist? A fine arts photographer? Yes, yes, yes and most certainly yes.

French photographer Marc Riboud isn't easily categorized, because he's never specialized in any particular area of photography. There are some recurring themes and stylistic idiosyncrasies in his work, but the pictures fall easily into half a dozen different modes of photography. For half a century Riboud has been shooting highly personal images that appeal to a variety of markets. The marketplace, however, has never been uppermost in his mind.

Born in Lyon, France in 1923, Riboud became interested in photography at an early age. His father, a combat veteran of the First World War, gave him the dented little Vest Pocket Kodak that he'd carried on the battlefield. It seems Riboud was initially as intrigued by the personal history of the camera as he was by the act of photography. "The camera stirred my imagination," he wrote, "for it had its own story to tell: it had witnessed the mud and the courage, the suffering and the absurdity of the trenches." In a very real way, that attitude epitomizes Riboud's photography; his work is about personal stories as interpreted through the camera.

War came to France when Riboud was seventeen years old. He joined the French Resistance movement as an active member of the Maquis du Vercors and took place in several engagements. At the end of the war, Riboud enrolled in Lyon's Ecole Centrale, where he studied engineering. After graduating, he accepted a position at a factory in the nearby town of Villeurbanne and began a normal life. His interest in photography, however, hadn't diminished.

Riboud took a week-long holiday from his job to attend (and, of course, to photograph) a drama festival held in Lyon. What was intended to be a brief holiday never ended; Riboud decided not to return to the factory. Perhaps the time he spent fighting with the Resistance made the regimented life of an engineer employed by a factory intolerable, perhaps he felt his position didn't permit him enough of an outlet for self-expression, perhaps Riboud went temporarily insane—we don't know. What we do know is that instead of resuming his safe and secure position, he decided to devote himself to photography.

Riboud went to New York City for a short period before returning to France. He moved to Paris where he had the good fortune to meet another photographer, also a veteran of the war: Henri Cartier-Bresson. Cartier-Bresson and his partners had founded the Magnum photography agency shortly after the war. He encouraged Riboud to keep working at his photography. A year later Magnum accepted Riboud as a member.

The unique approach of the Magnum agency allowed Riboud to shoot the sorts of photographs he wanted to shoot, while giving him a grounding in the actual business of photography. He learned he could actually sell the photographs he would have taken anyway. One of his first photographs for Magnum, a man applying a coat of paint to the Eiffel Tower, was published in LIFE magazine. Coincidentally, that photo became one of Riboud's signature images. It contains all the elements that characterize his style: an emphasis on graphic composition that works in balance with the human figures, who are always depicted with compassion.

Although his work for Magnum encompassed everything from portraits to photojournalism, Riboud never approached an assignment or a project with a political or social agenda. According to Riboud, photography "must not try to be persuasive. It cannot change the world, but it can show the world, especially when it is changing."

With the support of the Magnum Agency, Riboud documented a lot of change. For the next few years, from 1955 to 1960, he found his way through India, Nepal, Mongolia and the Soviet Union. He drove a car from Alaska to Mexico, shooting photographs as he went. He became one of the first Western photographers to be allowed into China after the Cultural Revolution. Later he would document rebellions and civil insurrections and wars in Africa, Southeast Asia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Algeria.

Wherever he went, his work always stressed the human element. English boys playing cowboy in the streets of London. Workers in China taking a brief break for lunch. Pilgrims at the ghats on the holy Ganges in Bénarès, India. Peasant herdsmen in Mongolia. He also shot portraits—both formal and informal—of movie stars, politicians, and diplomats, but his best work was always of common people.

Riboud describes himself as a "shy" photographer, saying "I was torn between the fear of getting too close to people and another force that egged me on to get a closer look." Not surprisingly, over the years he has developed some strong opinions about the practice of photography. He takes his cue from René Char, the French poet who advocated people should "foresee as a strategist and act as a primitive." In other words, Riboud believes a photographer should mentally sketch out the scene in terms of composition, but must also be alert for the happy accident—the gesture, the turn of the head, the unexpected element—that turns an ordinary image into something extraordinary. "Surprises of every kind lie in wait for the photographer," Riboud has written. "They open the eyes and quicken the heartbeat of those with a passion for looking."

His best work reveals a finely-tuned sense of balance between rigorous composition and openness to the moment. Experience allows him to put himself in the right spot to take advantage of the unexpected element while retaining the strong sense of composition. One of his iconic images—a 1967 photograph of a young woman protesting against the war in Vietnam facing a stern line of armed troops standing before the Pentagon and presenting them with a flower—is a classic example of Riboud's approach. He saw the situation as it was unfolding, took a position that provided a solid composition, and then remained poised in case a photograph presented itself. That same approach yielded a perfect moment one morning in China as his train stopped at a station. It's not just a matter of being in the right spot at the right moment; it's a matter of knowing where that spot is in case the moment takes place. Riboud was aware that the windows of the train would act as frames and he was prepared when each of the frames was filled.

In 1979 Riboud resigned as a full member of Magnum, though he remains a 'contributing member.' He continues to shoot the things that interest him with minimal regard to the marketability of his photographs. His work hangs in museums in Europe and North America, his photos are published in magazines throughout the world, he has won awards from several international photography bodies.

At 85 years of age, Marc Riboud feels he still sees the world in the same way he did when he was 13, looking through the lens of his father's camera. He still approaches his work the same way, though by now he's done it so often that it's almost instinctive. Riboud says it best: "I photograph the way a musician hums."

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

A single man stands like a bird-watcher,and scuffles the pepper and salt snowfrom a discarded, grayWestinghouse Electric cable drum.He cannot discover America by countingthe chains of condemned freight-trainsfrom thirty states. They jolt and jarand junk in the siding below him.He has trouble with his balance.His eyes drop,and he drifts with the wild iceticking seaward down the Hudson,like the blank sides of a jig-saw puzzle.

The ice ticks seaward like a clock.A negro toastswheat-seeds over the coke-fumesof a punctured barrel.Chemical airsweeps in from New Jersey,and smells of coffee.

Across the river,ledges of suburban factories tanin the sulphur-yellow sunof the unforgivable landscape.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Marcel Broodthaers (January 28, 1924 – January 28, 1976) was a Belgian poet, filmmaker and artist with a highly literate and often witty approach to creating art works.

He was born in Brussels, Belgium, where he was associated with the Groupe Surréaliste-revolutionnaire from 1945 and dabbled in journalism, film, and poetry. After spending 20 years in poverty as a struggling poet[1], he performed the symbolic act of embedding fifty unsold copies of his book of poems Pense-Bête in plaster, creating his first art object. That same year, 1964, for his first exhibition, he wrote a famous preface for the exhibition catalogue;

"I, too, wondered whether I could not sell something and succeed in life. For some time I had been no good at anything. I am forty years old... Finally the idea of inventing something insincere finally crossed my mind and I set to work straightaway. At the end of three months I showed what I had produced to Philippe Edouard Toussaint, the owner of the Galerie St Laurent. 'But it is art' he said 'and I will willingly exhibit all of it.' 'Agreed' I replied. If I sell something, he takes 30%. It seems these are the usual conditions, some galleries take 75%. What is it? In fact it is objects." Broodthaers, 1964[2]

He worked principally with assemblies of found objects and collage, often containing written texts. His most noted work was an installation which began in his Brussels house which he called Musée d'Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles (1968). This installation was followed by a further eleven manifestations of the 'museum', including at the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle for an exhibition in 1970 and at documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972. For such works he is associated with the late 20th century global spread of both installation art, as well as "institutional critique," in which interrelationships between artworks, the artist, and the museum are a focus.

Broodthaers died in Cologne, Germany on his 52nd birthday.Marcel Broodthaers was a poet and bookseller until age forty, when he turned to Conceptual art by creating a sculptural work composed of fifty copies of one of his poetry books, cast in plaster. He later became known for paradoxical word-image juxtapositions, as well as large-scale installations simulating museum exhibitions and assemblages made in part with eggshells, mussel shells, and European household goods. He also created paintings, films, performances, and sound pieces. In general, Broodthaers's work focuses on the ways in which social, economic, and institutional constructs influence and affect art's meaning.

Broodthaers's printed work consists of twenty-six individual prints, several in diptych format, and some twenty artist's books, mostly created to function as part of his Conceptual projects rather than as explorations of printmaking techniques. The diptych Museum-Museum presents Broodthaers's views on an institution of culture, which, he believes, decontextualizes art. Here identical bars of gold bullion are each stamped with an eagle, a reference to the "Eagle Department" in his fictional museum. On the left, they are labeled with artists' names, such as Mantegna, Ingres, and Duchamp, and on the right, with names of commodities such as sugar, tobacco, and chocolate. The bars along the bottom row of each panel carry the following captions: "IMITATION," "KOPIE," "COPIE," "FALSCH," and "ORIGINAL." By integrating issues of art and commerce, Broodthaers raises questions concerning the reduction of art objects to basic exchange commodities. Created for one of his mock museum installations, this print implicates museums for their role as treasuries of artistic currency and for their collaboration in the process of commodification as they act as guarantors of aesthetic values.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

On the TV an endless loop of cum shots with a voice over in DutchThey never go out in the day and they always do way too muchBenny and Cesar, two inseparable, insufferable foolsA couple of real rag dolls stuffed with sand and straw and real plastic jewelsBenny, a young Buster Keaton got up in powder, brilliant and in his primeCesar, a whisper of a man, full of good intention and petty crimeThey take on many lovers who only live inside of their headsThey’re all very handsome and of course they’re all very deadHe hates it when he looks at him that wayWith his pretty mouth full of obscenities, lies and decayYou don’t think that I’m man enough well then baby just you try meWe’ll move out to the desert where everyone wears Chrystal crowns in the shit hole kingdom a.k.a. i.e.Where the shit is always good and the endless day always badAlways the same question, how can you miss what you never had?Wrapped up in pink shower curtains and several rolls of packing tapeCesar looks flushed, his skin red, his mouth agapeTwitching with a sudden doubt in his eyes a budding fear“Ah fuck baby I’m sorry, I forgot you were still even here”

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Courage: your tongue has leftits natural position in the cheekwhere eddies of the breathare navigable calms. Nowit locks against the glottis oris snapped at by the teeth,in midstream: it must be workto get out what you mean:the rapids of the breathare furious with beliefand the tongue, as bloodand animal of speech,to stop it, block it, or come cleanover the rocks of teethand down the races of the air,tumbled and bruised to death.Relax it into acting, bethe air's straw-hatcanoeist with a mandolinyodeling over the falls.This is the sound adviceof experts and a true despair:it is the toll to pass the locksdown to the old mill streamwhere lies of love are fair.

Saturday, January 2, 2010

Mitch Epstein born 1952 in Holyoke, Massachusetts is an American photographer.

Epstein was a student of Gary Winogrand at The Cooper Union in 1972, after having attended the Rhode Island School of Design. While at Cooper, Epstein relinquished classical black and white photography to use color, which was, at the time, considered a slick tool of advertising. Epstein helped pioneer the redefinition of color photography as art form.

By the mid-1970s, Epstein had abandoned his academic studies and begun to travel, embarking on a photographic exploration of the United States. In 1978, he journeyed to India with his then wife, director Mira Nair, where he was a producer, set designer, and cinematographer on several films, including Salaam Bombay! and ''India Cabaret. His book In Pursuit of India is a compilation of his Indian photographs from this period.

From 1992 to 1995, Epstein photographed in Vietnam, which resulted in a large one-wall grid installation, along with a book titled Vietnam: A Book of Changes. Epstein's Vietnam pictures reveal the complexity of a culture molded by French colonialism, the American war, and western consumer culture. “I don’t know that Mitch Epstein’s glorious photographs record all of what is salient in end-of-the-twentieth century Vietnam," wrote Susan Sontag, "for it’s been more than two decades since my two stays there. I can testify that his images confirm what moved and troubled me then…and offer shrewd and poignant glimpses into the costs of imposing a certain modernity. This is beautiful, authoritative work by an extremely intelligent and gifted photographer.”

Having lived and traveled beyond the United States for over a decade, Epstein began to spend more time in his adopted home of New York City. He managed to turn New York into a city that looked unfamiliar—as imagined as it was real—in The City, a series of pictures that was the first chapter in his American trilogy.

In 1999, he began what would become the second chapter of the trilogy. Epstein returned to his hometown of Holyoke, Massachusetts, to record the demise of his father's two businesses—a retail furniture store and a low-rent real estate empire. The resulting project assembled large-format photographs, video, archival materials, interviews and writing by the artist. The book, Family Business (Steidl), which combined all of these elements, won the 2004 Krazna-Kraus Best Photography Book of the Year award. Family Business is often cited as a seminal work of photography, as well as bookmaking.

The American trilogy was completed with a project called American Power. From 2004 to 2009, Epstein explored how landscape and society intersect in the United States via energy production. He photographed energy production sites and their environs in twenty-five states, often hounded by Homeland Security agents. These pictures question notions of power, electrical and political. The large-scale prints from this series have been exhibited worldwide and published as a monograph (Steidl, 2009). In a review for Art in America, Dave Coggins wrote that Epstein "grounds his images...in the human condition, combining empathy with sharp social observation, politics with sheer beauty."

Epstein is now collaborating with his second wife, author Susan Bell, on a public art installation based on American Power. American Power Public Art (APPA) will use billboards and transportation posters, as well as a website, to disseminate art and text to a broad public; and, in so doing, prompt environmental awareness and activism.

Epstein has exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. In spring 2007, FOAM museum in Amsterdam exhibited a selection from Family Business and American Power. His additional books include Recreation: American Photographs 1973-1988 and the recent retrospective WORK. Epstein was a Guna S. Mundheim Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany in spring 2008. He lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.